Through a Kantian lens

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“When I left school I wanted to be a rockstar”, recounts Andrew Stephenson, who played in a band as a teenager. His plans changed at music college, when his band split up and he realized that the other students were much better musicians than he was. Another reason was a book his mother gave him as a present: Bryan Magee’s The Story of Philosophy. “Instead of practicing, I read. A lot.”

He switched to Cardiff University in Wales to study philosophy. Initially, he enjoyed life and did not really focus on his studies, until a lecturer punctured his complacency: “Early in my second year, a professor sharply criticized an essay I’d submitted. That made me sit up and take stock. Perhaps I wasn’t as clever as I thought I was. Maybe I should put in more effort. I loved philosophy, but I’d never taken academic study very seriously. From that moment on, I worked harder. Philosophy started to open up to me in much greater depth.”

Stephenson’s newly kindled ambition and effort paid off. After his bachelor’s degree, he attended the University of Oxford on a full scholarship, which he describes now as pure luck. At Merton College, he completed a postgraduate degree then a doctorate in philosophy.

From 2013 to 2015, he was a lecturer at Trinity College Oxford. This was followed by his first research residency in Germany, on a Leverhulme award at Humboldt University in Berlin. After that, Stephenson became a lecturer at the University of Southampton, where – after two further German stints, at the DFG Centre for Advanced Studies “Human Abilities” in Berlin and the Research Center for Analytic German Idealism in Leipzig – he became Associate Professor in 2025. Then he was appointed Professor of Philosophy at LMU, specializing in the history of philosophy from modernity to the present. He took up the position at the start of the 2025/26 winter semester.

Questions that connect everything

Looking back, recalls Stephenson, he had always philosophized, even during his schooldays with his peers. “But that only became apparent to me in retrospect.” He is fascinated by the depth of the questions addressed in philosophy, as well as the abstraction: “Every fundamental question is a philosophical question. It doesn’t matter where you begin: As long as you keep asking “why” you get to philosophy pretty quickly. This means that philosophical questions connect everything and are themselves all interconnected.”

Ultimately, he thinks there is just one truly fundamental philosophical question: “And that concerns the connection between reason and nature. This brings us quite rapidly to questions of freedom – What does it mean to be free and act freely? But also: What is thinking?”

During his bachelor’s degree, Stephenson had already acquired an interest in the topics he explores today. This was thanks to a lecturer at Cardiff, who introduced him to the thought of Immanuel Kant. “After that, I saw all philosophical questions through a Kantian lens.”

Stephenson cites a simple example to illustrate the fundamental yet human-centered nature of Kant’s thought: “Everybody knows that technology is based on mathematics – mathematics works in the world. But how is it possible that we can practice mathematics just by thinking – that is, somehow independently of experience and from our armchairs, even though it seems to hold the world together? Kant explores questions like this. After all, the same question applies to philosophy itself: It is not an empirical science; it is practiced from the armchair, so to speak. And yet it concerns reality, the essence of nature and reason. So, how is philosophy itself possible?”

Attracted by reputation of LMU

Stephenson came to LMU for a variety of reasons. He already knew Munich from his time as an exchange student at the Maximilianeum. Familial connections also spoke for Germany. But above all it was the prospective colleagues and their research that attracted him. “LMU is a leading university for the type of philosophy I practice. I feel very honored to work here and cannot wait to collaborate with colleagues and engage with students.”

At Oxford he was the only student in his class who was interested in Kant. “My classmates were all into contemporary logic, metaphysics, and epistemology. That was good for my education. It’s why I also work on connecting Kant’s philosophy with current debates today.” This extends even to artificial intelligence. For example, Stephenson contributed to a project that involved an attempt to bring together Kantian theory and machine learning.

Understanding Kant correctly

In 2024, Stephenson co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Kant, which summarizes the current state of research on the philosopher. He is currently working on a monograph in which he defends Kant’s conception of the relationship between a priori knowledge and necessity. He thinks that Kant has been widely misunderstood on this matter, and in a way that matters not only to the history of philosophy but to philosophical research today.

“Kant’s guiding question is: How can we have a priori knowledge of real or objective necessities, necessities which concern not merely concepts but things?” explains Stephenson. “The way in which Kant set up the problem, and how he proposed to solve it, changed philosophy forever.”

“We know what happens to be true: for example, that there’s a water bottle there on my desk. And we also have the notion that I could have forgotten to bring my water bottle with me today, so that it’s possible that things were different. But the latter is a funny sort of truth: it’s a mere possibility. And there are also things that could not have been otherwise. For example, that two and two is four. This means we know different kinds of truth. But how? I have a physical connection with many of the things that I know about. I see the water bottle. But I don’t see mere possibilities, or necessity,” explains Stephenson in lay terms. So how can we have knowledge of them?

“Kant’s theory of what is possible and what is necessary, and how we can know this, was a turning point in the history of philosophy. It drew together insights while overturning shared assumptions from the traditions that preceded it, and it issued in over 100 years of response and modification.” The dawn of analytic philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century was concerned with rejecting this theory. But, according to Stephenson, contemporary philosophers have misunderstood Kant, in particular since Saul Kripke’s important and influential criticism.

Kripke instigated his own revolution in philosophy, in part by overturning what he thought was Kant’s assumption that knowledge of necessity had to be a priori. “But in fact, I argue, Kripke and Kant are talking past one another, since they have such different conceptions of both a priori knowledge and necessity. This doesn’t mean that Kant has to be right. It does mean we have to reread him. And perhaps we can learn something by doing so. Because I think we are still facing the same problem that Kant faced as regards how we can know about possibilities and necessities. Indeed I think Kant’s answer to this problem is still the most sophisticated one we have.”

If Stephenson proves to be right in his conviction, then the history of epistemology, metaphysics, and logic since Kant has to be reevaluated. Because if Kant has been misunderstood, the same goes for philosophy after Kant.

Stephenson devoted his first semester at LMU to his book. In the summer semester, the new faculty member will teach his first classes at LMU. He is keen to convey to students his passion for philosophy and its importance. “Philosophy is unique to beings like humans. The most powerful thing people can do is to ask philosophical questions.”

Mehr über die Forschung von Andrew Stephenson:

Anil Gomes (ed.), Andrew Stephenson (ed.): The Oxford Handbook of Kant

Andrew Stephenson: private Webseite von Andrew Stephenson